6/24/2013

China's Supercomputer Regains No. 1 Ranking - ScienceInsider

China has regained the top spot on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The latest version of a semiannual ranking posted yesterday shows that Tianhe-2, built by China's National University of Defense Technology, was clocked at 33.86 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second). That's nearly twice as powerful as the 17.59 pflops performance of Titan, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which led the previous Top 500 list put out by a team of supercomputer researchers in the United States and Germany.

Tianhe-2 marks the second time a Chinese machine has been a world-beater. Tianhe-1 grabbed the top spot in November 2010 before relinquishing it 6 months later to Japan's K computer. China's second ascent demonstrates the country's sustained commitment to funding high performance computing, says Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who closely follows international supercomputing trends. "It shows no signs of changing, only increasing," Dongarra says about China's investment in supercomputing.

The United States remains the overall supercomputing leader, with 252 of the top 500 systems. But China is in second place, with 66 machines. Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany fill out the top six, with 30, 29, 23, and 19 systems, respectively.